Peter Andres · Retrospective

The first major photo performance. Created in 1983 and 1984 together with Patrick. The first shots were taken with normal light bulbs. The other series, however, were taken with the new studio flash system.

Canabrett… a word combination of canapé, a comfortable place to sit, and board, a shelf on my bookshelf.

The reversal of a judgment

A short picture story, created and photographed on April 19, 1984. I used my studio flash system outside the house for the first time.

The Swiss Fichenskandal 1985:
Je t’aime – moi non plus

It was February 1985. Communication among like-minded people. E-mail didn’t exist back then. And of course there weren’t dating apps either. The internet had only just been invented, and it wasn’t usable until the end of the 80s, and then only tentatively.

Nevertheless, the question kept coming up: are gays also registered?

And then in 1989 came the Swiss Fichenskandal. The Federal Police and the Federal Prosecutor's Office, together with the cantonal police, collected around 900,000 observation files on people and organizations, mainly from the left-wing environment (or rather: from the non-center-right camp).

Are we among them? – Maybe.
An attempt at a pictorial answer.

Nude photographs are fascinating and have their own special requirements. The photographic implementation requires caution and a certain amount of experimentation, because it is all too easy to fall into a cliché or into a purely sexual representation.

Living nudity, experiencing nudity are two wonderful experiences. Capturing it photographically can produce impressive images. I am just one of many photographers. Unfortunately, the possibility of publishing such images has suffered greatly in recent times. Facebook, Instagram and others say hello! Nudity is prohibited on many publicly accessible social media. This is in contrast to crime, war images, etc.

Lived nudity in images can go much further. I will address this with the topic of multidimensionality a little later.

View and insight

Motion blur is becoming increasingly important in my pictures. I see it as one of the most important design tools.

How do I get more time into the picture? Long exposure and motion blur work very well. Copying several images into one another, photos that were taken one after the other with the camera, works too! Back then, without digital options, it wasn't so easy. But the slide projector helped.

The unstoppable rise

A series of images with no beginning and no end. You have to make up the story yourself.

The photos were taken using only the available light. There was no flash. Available light photography was very popular back then (1986). I used normal black and white film on the one hand and Polaroid black and white slide film on the other, which had just come onto the market at the time. You can recognize them by their grainy structure.

1984 to 1986 was a very intense time in terms of photography. Experiment after experiment followed. My deck chair learned to fly. And it could do it perfectly! The bust had offspring, peppers could grow and a lot more. All via camera.

Patrick was a great help with the documentation. Unfortunately, the camera with the 8mm video cassettes has fallen victim to the ravages of time. As a result, it is no longer possible to play them.

Friday, April 25, 1986

Lady Gaga was born just under a month earlier. Nobody noticed that at the time. Not yet. On the other hand, the day after was dramatic. Worldwide. The nuclear disaster occurred in reactor block 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Neither had any influence on my photography, at least not directly.

But then I had time and a few Polaroid slides. These had to be exposed! It was not just an encounter with a stubborn film material.

Spring 2021

A little later, in February and March 2021, I had some time again. It was lockdown. So: ideal for digitizing the photo archive. Old experiments resurfaced in boxes.

There they are now. Easily accessible in the digital photo archive. And when I look at the photos again, I have to say, the Pola-Slides have their irresistible charm! Even what they show...